Everyone knows that the best-tasting holiday cookies are the ones made from scratch with fresh ingredients and a lot of love. The same goes for gifts. Southern California’s indie presses are cooking up unique, reasonably priced poetry and fiction appealing to almost every taste. Check them out online or visit an indie bookstore, and enjoy the warm holiday feeling that comes from knowing you supported local artists and businesses instead of overseas sweatshops and multi-national retail chains.
Here are a few presses and stores we recommend.
Southern California-based Presses:
- Angel City Press: nostalgic yet cool illustrated books
- Arktoi Books: poetry and fiction that give lesbian writers access to “the conversation”
- Cahuenga Press: poetry that honors creative freedom and cooperation
- Cloverfield Press: books as visually beautiful as they are intellectually and emotionally stimulating
- Dzanc Books: literary fiction that falls outside the mainstream
- Gorsky Press: risk-taking books that encourage readers to re-examine society
- Green Integer: essays, manifestos, speeches, epistles, narratives, and more
- Les Figues Press: aesthetic conversations between readers, writers, and artists, with an avant-garde emphasis
- Make Now Press: contemporary works of constraint and conceptual literature
- Otis Books/Seismicity: contemporary fiction, poetry, essays, creative non-fiction and translation
- Red Hen Press: poetry and more by writers whose work has been marginalized
- San Diego City Works Press: local, ethnic, political, and border writing
- Santa Monica Press: offbeat looks at pop culture, lively how-to books, film history, travel, and humor
Independent Bookstores in L.A.:
- Book Soup, West Hollywood
- A Different Light, West Hollywood
- Eso Won Books, Leimert Park
- Family, Fairfax District
- IMIX Bookstore, Eagle Rock
- Metropolis Books, Downtown
- Skylight Books, Los Feliz
- Small World Books, Venice
- Vroman’s Bookstore, Pasadena
Happy holidays from the Future of Publishing Think Tank*!
*The Future of Publishing Think Tank is an ad hoc group of writers and representatives of independent publishers and bookstores, nonprofit literary organizations, and producers of public radio. Our task: to consider the changes occurring in publishing, distribution, and marketing of literary work and to envision new ways for writers to engage readers and build audiences for their work. Groups who that have been involved include 826LA, Arktoi Books, GuerrillaReads, the HeArt Project, Hol Art Books, “Indymedia on Air” (KPFK), the Lambda Literary Foundation, Les Figues Press, Poet Joi, Poets & Writers, Red Hen Press, Skylight Books, and Writers at Work.
Writers At Work 
Hello Friends of Literature,
One of the best exercises I use on a daily basis is to look up words (about 10 or 12) in the dictionary listing them in a column, then trying to make a poem of them. It always amazes me since they generally turn out very short, zany, humorous, and well worth the effort.
Another exercise I like is to build a poem from the alphabet, using only the alphabet lead letter. I’ve done them forward and backward and have always been happily surprised.
Thanks for this opportunity to share ideas
to stimulate the imagination. Isn’t that what writing is all about?
Warmest wishes, and HAPPY HOLIDAYS!
Patricia D’Alessandro
Host – “Valley Voices of the Muse”
Barnes&Noble/Palm Desert/Westfield
Center/ funded by POETS&WRITERS
Magazine, with a grant received from
the James Irvine Foundation.